In recent years, personal computers and other data processing devices have been used in an environment allowing access to a plurality of printers. For example, a system that has a plurality of data processing devices connected to a plurality of printers via a network may be set up so that each of the data processing devices can access each of the printers. With this system, virtual devices corresponding to the printers are registered in the data processing device so that the user can specify which of the printers is the output destination.
Further, a plurality of virtual devices may be registered in a data processing device, even when the data processing device uses only a single printer as the output destination. For example, when a plurality of different print settings is used frequently, it is possible to register a plurality of virtual devices for a single printer such that each virtual device has different default settings. If the user wishes to use a variety of print settings for a single printer in this way, the user can perform printing with the desired print settings simply by selecting one of the virtual devices having the desired print settings as the default settings. Therefore, the user need not modify the printer settings for each print operation regarding whether to use the duplex print function, whether to use the color print function, and which of the paper cassettes to use, thereby eliminating the troublesome operations involved in modifying print settings.
However, if the number of virtual devices registered in a single data processing device becomes excessive under these circumstances, the user must search for the desired virtual device from numerous virtual devices. As a result, the user must take more time to find the desired virtual device, reducing user-friendliness when selecting virtual devices.
To resolve this problem, technologies such as that disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2005-267544 have been proposed for managing the frequency of printer usage and deleting virtual devices registered in association with printers having low usage frequency. With this technology, the data processing device does not display virtual devices having a low usage frequency as selections when the user is prompted to select one of a plurality of virtual devices. The technology is expected to facilitate the user in selecting a virtual device by reducing the number of choices.